


hang the stars from their wretched strings

by CaineGreyson



Category: Black Mirror
Genre: Fix-It of Sorts, Fluff and Angst, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-30
Updated: 2018-12-30
Packaged: 2019-09-30 20:04:33
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,223
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17230358
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CaineGreyson/pseuds/CaineGreyson
Summary: stefan butler keeps hunting for the right reality.colin ritman has to be a part of it.





	hang the stars from their wretched strings

“What’s your name?” Colin Ritman asked without looking.

“Stefan,” he said for the hundredth, thousandth time. His fingers twitched towards his earlobe. Colin tensed with his eyes still on the screen, his hunched back so close that Stefan could easily reach out, reach out and trace his fingers along his spine, the same way he had—

Well: strictly speaking, the same way he had never done before.  
  
Colin Ritman turned around. Stefan looked at the floor. His satchel pulled one shoulder lower than the other. He scratched an itch on the back of his neck, the same itch of yesterday and the day before and the day before that. It was always the same. It was always him standing here with his stupid satchel, the book burning a hole in the ratty canvas, Colin Ritman’s eyes boring into him. The quirk of his eyebrow, the sarcasm, the sharpness—you didn’t have to know Colin to know he’d have a quick wit.

“And how did you get in here, Stefan?” asked Colin, and Stefan lurched, remembering where he was.

He was standing in Colin’s apartment, the curtains drawn. He remembered pulling them across yesterday, or was that the previous yesterday? The one when Colin had taken him to the balcony and pressed him up against the—

No, no he hadn’t.

He hadn’t, because this was a new reality. They may as well be strangers, even if Stefan knew that they were not.  
  
“I called over before work,” he lied. “I wanted to know if you brought home—my book. If you brought home my book.”

Colin stared at him. “No,” he said, soft and smooth. “No, I didn’t bring home any books. Are you sure that’s why you’re here?”

Stefan blinked rapidly. His mouth was dry, the same way it had been the morning after Colin offered him the tab on the tip of his finger. He tasted blood. It reminded him, sudden and blinding, of the time he killed his dad and buried him amongst the petunias. That was a few realities ago. He couldn’t seem to get there again. He couldn’t seem to get past Colin, Colin, Colin in the office or on the street or, hell, in his own bedroom, leaning over him, his breath warm on Stefan’s neck and his fingers tapping away at the keyboard.

Stefan opened his mouth. He looked over at the balcony doors, disguised by their curtains. The room looked more domestic in the morning light and less like a psychopathic sex den. 

He really, really wished it was a psychopathic sex den.

Kitty tapped on the door with her long nails. “Col,” she said. Stefan eyed her. Her hair was wild, and there was a long tear in her black tights. It looked as though she’d slept in them. He imagined Colin ripping at her clothes, his hands roaming underneath the baggy t-shirt she wore, his mouth pressed against the delicate, breakable skin of her neck—

“I’m Stefan,” he said, sticking out his hand. _Act normal. Act like Not-Stefan._ “I work with Colin—at Tuckersoft.”

Out of the corner of his eye, he could see Colin watching him. Colin knew very well that Stefan didn’t work at Tuckersoft, because as much as Mohan Tucker liked to pretend they were the biggest gaming company in the United Kingdom, they only had three staff on the payroll and a couple of freelancers on Tuesdays and Thursdays. Stefan had spent one reality going through the books in the office, mostly out of boredom and a sense that if he didn’t get a break from all this world-shifting, he was going to have yet another breakdown.

Kitty gave him a confused smile and shook his hand. Her eyes kept darting to Colin’s over Stefan’s shoulder. He got the impulse to stick his fingers right into her eye socket. He ran his thumb over his knuckles instead. Stefan had learned how to ride the wave. You had to, when every time you woke up, every time you made the wrong decision, you had to relive everything all over again.

And _god_ , he kept making the wrong decisions.

“I just called over to check if Colin had something of mine. I hope we didn’t wake you,” he apologised, and she laughed.

“No, no, ‘course not. I’ve been up for hours. Brought our Pearl out for a walk and all.”

He resisted the urge to look her up and down, nodded tightly, and turned back to Colin instead. “I’d better go. I’ll see you back at the office later, yeah?”

“Don’t rush off,” said Colin, adjusting his glasses. He was still watching Stefan with the look of a man cracking a code. “I’ll drop you there. I’m about to head down anyway.”

They said goodbye to Kitty, who kissed Colin harder than she needed to at the front door. Stefan’s fist tightened in the pocket of his jacket. They got into the car in silence. Colin started the engine, backed out of the car park, and entered the traffic. Stefan’s knee bounced.

“I _have_ met you before,” Colin said. Stefan watched the tiniest of smiles spread over his face.

_You’ve cracked the puzzle._

“In the office,” Stefan replied, his voice cracking a little in his excitement. “Like I said.”

Colin chuckled. “In the office, you’re right. You’ve played all of my games.”

“Except—”

“Except the ones on the Commodore, I know. You don’t have one.” Stefan smiled. Colin’s hand landed on his knee, stopping the anxious movement with a heavy touch. “I told you we’d see each other again. I keep telling you that, and you keep ignoring me.” Colin looked over at him, relaxed as ever. “I keep _telling_ you.”

“I know, but—”

“You’re impatient. And a perfectionist. You keep searching for the happy ending, but what if there is none? Happiness is a construct—it’s a chemical reaction in your brain, Stefan. You can have it anywhere, any time. It doesn’t have any temporality, it isn’t linked to time, it’s just _there_ because your brain produces it. What you keep searching for doesn’t exist.”

“It does,” he said, calling on every ounce of the stubbornness his dad had always hated in him, all the stubbornness that killed his mum on the 8:45 because he couldn’t find his stupid rabbit. “It does Colin. There’s a happy ending somewhere—one where I’m alive, and so are you, and we haven’t killed my dad and my mum is around and—I don’t know, maybe you still have Pearl if that’s what makes you happy—”

“It’s not real.”

“I’ll make it real.”

Colin went quiet. He took his hand off Stefan’s knee and put it into his pocket, the other still steadying the wheel. He withdrew a joint.

“Light this for me?” he asked. “Lighter’s on the—”

“Yeah, I’ve got it,” he said, plucking it up from the dashboard. Colin held the joint between his lips. Stefan lit it. Colin took a deep pull, withdrew it, and said, “You’re going to be the death of me.”

“I have been. A lot. That’s the point. I don’t _want_ to keep having to choose between you and everyone else.”

“I know you don’t.” He took another drag. Smoke filtered through the car. “Look, try it again. I warned you. There’s no five-star ending where you and I get to be together like some kind of game-dev-power-couple. For fuck’s sake, twenty years ago it would’ve been illegal for me to shag you, you know that don’t you?”

“And not for _me_ to shag _you_?”

“Not the point,” said Colin, but he was smiling again. “My point is that you need to learn to make the best of what you’ve got. You got this reality, you have no control, they make you do things you don’t want to do, and they fuck up your life over and over again. That’s it. That’s our Pacman reality.”

“I don’t have to do what they say anymore. And anyway, they don’t even make the choices most of the time. We’re friends,” Stefan says, “and they let me pick what I want, unless… well, unless they’re curious.”

“You’re saying you’ve made friends with your spirit? Your assigned government agent? Whatever it is that controls us?”

“I think so,” Stefan admitted. He dared to smile a little hopefully. Colin looked at him incredulously, and then pulled into the Tuckersoft car park.

“Christ. Of course you have.”

“I think they want us to be together. At the beginning,” Stefan explained, even as Colin was stubbing out the joint and undoing his seatbelt, “At the beginning they wanted to see how far they could push me, but in the end, they always lead me back to you. They always try to make me spend time with you, talk to you, _save_ you even.”

Colin opened the car door and swung his long legs out. His glasses slipped down his nose and he fixed them. In one particularly successful reality, Colin had brought Stefan to a chip shop for lunch. They’d kissed around the back, high on the smell of grease and vinegar. Stefan had fixed his glasses for him. Colin had smiled, a real, warm, loving smile.

“I just think it’s a lot of effort and a lot of pain for something that might not be real,” said Colin, “but if you think it’s worth it…”

They walked into the building together. Mohan Tucker introduced himself to Stefan. Colin went and sat broodingly at his desk, his chin in his hand. Stefan said no to the deal. He hung about outside for half an hour until Colin could get away, and then they strolled down to a nearby park. It was abandoned, even on this bright July day. Colin sprawled out on the grass and patted the spot next to him. The light reflected off his glasses.

“Tell me,” he said, when Stefan had settled next to him.

“Tell you what?” he asked. He lay down, his back against Colin’s chest. He felt fingers playing with his belt loop. Colin could never be still, not really. He was always twitching, always moving. Stefan had learned that over the last few realities, the more successful ones.

The ones where Colin was alive, and sometimes they kissed, and sometimes more.

It ended in tragedy every time, but he supposed there was always room for improvement.

“Tell me about your perfect reality,” Colin said into his ear. His hand covered Stefan’s hip. He shivered. “What’s your goal?”

Stefan closed his eyes. “There’s this image in my head,” he said, “of a house, and it’s got… it’s got paintings and posters all over the walls, and plants in the living room, and it’s got two offices: one for you, and one for me.”

Colin laughed quietly. “Because we like to work alone.”

“Exactly,” whispered Stefan. “Two offices, one bedroom. We don’t work at Tuckersoft. Maybe we have our own company, or I could work for you—I wouldn’t mind that. The point is, we’re together. We live in France or somewhere like that, somewhere far away but not too far, and we can travel whenever we like.”

“Sounds like heaven so far,” said Colin, and he kissed the sharp line of Stefan’s jaw. “Go on.”

“We take each other on dates and we don’t have to worry about people looking at us funny,” he said. “We walk on the beach sometimes. Neither of us is ever in the hole, because we know how to take care of ourselves and we’re _healthy_ , both of us, and—and—”

“And we’re married,” said Colin, softly in his ear, taking over from where Stefan couldn’t carry on. “I proposed. Your mum walked you up the aisle. I cried.”

“You’d love my mum. She’d love you, I bet. We have to—you have to meet her someday.”

“’Course I will.” Colin sighed, a soft, fluttering thing. “You’re killing me, Stefan.”

“I love you,” he said. He felt that his eyes were raw before he noticed he was crying.

“Mmm. Love you too.” Colin sat up and stretched. He very pointedly didn’t look at Stefan. “I have to get back to the office.”

Stefan let him go, the promise of an evening meal at the chip shop lingering in his mind. He went back to the house. Dad asked about his day. He told him it had been fine, made himself a cup of tea, grabbed a custard cream from the packet, and headed for the stairs. He had to work on the game, had to see if he could fix that new path—

He caught the first lines of the news report seconds before his mug hit the ground.

“… _computer game superstar Colin Ritman was killed today when the building of Tuckersoft, one of the UK’s most successful computer game companies, partially burned down shortly after three o’clock. Ritman was the only person hurt in the incident, which it is believed occurred after Mohan Tucker, owner of Tuckersoft, failed to install fire alarms in the company’s new building…”_

“You alright?” his dad asked, pale-faced. “Did you know him?”

Stefan stared at the television. Knife. Rope. Blunt object. Window.

“No,” he said. “I’d seen him around, but… no.”

Stefan Butler walked upstairs.

It was time to restart again.

They had found another dead end.


End file.
